A Historic Moment: The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History

Source: James Petras, Information Clearinghouse.

“I have a vision of Americans in their 80′s being wheeled to their offices and factories having lost their legs in imperial wars and their pensions to Wall Street speculators and with bitter memories of voting for a President who promised change, prosperity and peace and then appointed financial swindlers and war mongers.” An itinerant Minister 2008

December 08, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics. For reasons completely foreign to the emotional ejaculations of his boosters, it is a historic moment: witness the abysmal gap between his ‘populist’ campaign demagoguery and his long-standing and deepening carnal relations with the most retrograde political figures, power brokers and billionaire real estate and financial backers.

What was evident from even a cursory analysis of his key campaign advisers and public commitments to Wall Street speculators, civilian militarists, zealous Zionists and corporate lawyers was hidden from the electorate, by Obama’s people friendly imagery and smooth, eloquent deliverance of a message of ‘hope’. He effectively gained the confidence, dollars and votes of tens of millions of voters by promising ‘change’ (implying higher taxes for the rich, ending the Iraq war and national health care reform) when in fact his campaign advisers (and subsequent strategic appointments) pointed to a continuation of the economic and military policies of the Bush Administration.

Within 3 weeks of his election he appointed all the political dregs who brought on the unending wars of the past two decades, the economic policy makers responsible for the financial crash and the deepening recession castigating tens of millions of Americans today and for the foreseeable future. We can affirm that the election of Obama does indeed mark a historic moment in American history: The victory of the greatest con man and his accomplices and backers in recent history.

He spoke to the workers and worked for their financial overlords.

He flashed his color to minorities while obliterating any mention of their socio-economic grievances.

He promised peace in the Middle East to the majority of young Americans and slavishly swears undying allegiance to the War Party of American Zionists serving a foreign colonial power (Israel).

Obama, on a bigger stage, is the perfect incarnation of Melville’s Confidence Man. He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East on behalf of a foreign country. He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising you that better days are ahead.

Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ leftists and academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking engagements as platforms to promote the con man’s candidacy: They described the con man’s political pitch as “meeting the deeply felt needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he spoke of ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the policies and policy makers who were the architects of our current political-economic disaster.

The Con Man’s Self-Opiated Progressive Camp Followers

The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political activities was clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized masses and the self-opiated ‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s election and after he appointed every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the top economic policy positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged imperial wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog along with the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s appointments of war mongers and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time now in order to move ‘left’ later.

Never ones to publicly admit their ‘historic’ errors, the same progressives turned to writing ‘open letters to the President’ pleading the ‘cause of the people’. Their epistles, of course, may succeed in passing through the shredder in the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

The conjurer who spoke of ‘change’ now speaks of ‘experience’ in appointing to every key and minor position the same political hacks who rotate seamlessly between Wall Street and Washington, the Fed and Academia. Instead of ‘change’ there is the utmost continuity of policy makers, policies and above all ever deepening ties between militarists, Wall Street and the Obama appointments. True believer-progressives, facing their total debacle, grab for any straw. Forced to admit that all of Obama’s appointments represent the dregs of the bloody and corrupt past, they hope and pray that ‘current dire circumstances’ may force these unrepentant warmongers and life long supporters of finance capital to become supporters and advocates of a revived Keynesian welfare state. On the contrary, Obama and each and everyone of his foreign policy appointments to the Pentagon, State and Justice Departments, Intelligence and Security agencies are calling for vast increases in military spending, troop commitments and domestic militarization to recover the lost fortunes of a declining empire. Obama and his appointees plan to vigorously pursue Clinton-Bush’s global war against national resistance movements in the Middle East. His most intimate and trusted ‘Israel-First’ advisers have targeted Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine and Iraq.

Obama’s Economic Con Game

Then there is the contrast between the trillions Obama will shower on the financial swindlers (and any other ‘too big to fail’ private capitalist enterprise) and his zero compensation for the 100 million heads of families swindled of $5 trillion dollars in savings and pensions by his cohort appointees and bailout beneficiaries. Not a cent is allocated for the long term unemployed. Not a single household threatened with eviction will be bailed out.

Obama is the trademark name of a network of confidence people. They are a well-organized gang of prominent political operative, money raisers, mass media hustlers, real estate moguls and academic pimps. They are joined and abetted by the elected officials and hacks of the Democratic Party. Like the virtuoso performer, Obama projected the image and followed the script. But the funding and the entire ‘populist’ show was constructed by the hard-nosed, hard-line free marketeers, Jewish and Gentile ‘Israel Firsters’, Washington war mongers and a host of multi-millionaire ‘trade union’ bureaucrats.

The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely propelling a dozen strategic con artists into high office and the White House. First and foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the rage and anger of tens of millions of economically skewered and war drained Americans from turning their hostility against a discredited presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two factions political system and into direct action or at least toward a new political movement.

Secondly the Obama image provided a temporary cover for the return and continuity of all that was so detested by the American people – the arrogant untouchable swindlers, growing unemployment and economic uncertainty, the loss of life savings and homes and the endless, ever-expanding imperial wars.

Featuring Paul Volker, ‘Larry’ Summers, Robert Gates, the Clintons, Geithner, Holder and General (‘You drink your kool-aid while I sit on Boeings’ Board of Directors’) Jim Jones USMC, Obama treats us to a re-run of military surges and war crimes, Wall Street banditry, Abu Ghraib, AIPAC hustlers and all the sundry old crap. Our Harvard-minted Gunga Din purports to speak for all the colonial subjects but acts in the interest of the empire, its financial vampires, its war criminals and its Middle East leaches from the Land of the Chosen.

The Two Faces of Obama

Like the Janus face found on the coins of the early Roman Republic, Obama and his intimate cronies cynically joked about ‘which is the real face of Barack’, conscious of the con-job they were perpetrating during the campaign. In reality, there is only one face – a very committed, very consequential and very up front Obama, who demonstrated in every single one of his appointments the face of an empire builder.

Obama is an open militarist, intent by every means possible to re-construct a tattered US empire. The President-Elect is an unabashed Wall Street Firster – one who has placed the recuperation of the biggest banks and investment houses as his highest priority. Obama’s nominees for all the top economic positions (Treasury, Chief White House economic advisers) are eminently qualified, (with long-term service to the financial oligarchy), to pursue Obama’s pro-Wall Street agenda. There is not a single member of his economic team, down to the lowest level of appointees, who represents or has defended the interests of the wage or salaried classes (or for that matter the large and small manufacturers from the devastated ‘productive’ industrial economy).

The Obama propagandists claim his appointments reflect his preference for ‘experience’ – which is true: his team members have plenty of ‘experience’ through their long and lucrative careers maximizing profits, buyouts and speculation favoring the financial sector. Obama does not want to have any young, untested appointees who have no long established records of serving Big Finance, whose interests are too central to Obama’s deepest and most strongly held core beliefs. He wanted reliable economic functionaries who recognize that re-financing billionaire financiers is the central task of his regime. The appointments of the Summers, Rubins, Geithners and Volkers fit perfectly with his ideology: They are the best choices to pursue his economic goals.

Critics of these nominations write of the ‘failures’ of these economists and their role in ‘bringing about the collapse of the financial system’. These critics fail to recognize that it is not their ‘failures’, which are the relevant criteria, but their unwavering commitment to the interests of Wall Street and their willingness to demand trillions of dollars more from US taxpayers to bolster their colleagues on Wall Street.

Under Clinton and Bush, in the run up to the financial collapse, they facilitated (‘deregulated’) the practice of swindling one hundred million Americans of trillions in private savings and pension funds. In the current crisis period with Obama they are just the right people to swindle the US Treasury of trillions of dollars in bailout funds to refinance their fellow oligarchs. The White President (Bush) leaves steaming financial turds all over the White House rugs and Wall Street summons the ‘historic’ Negro President Obama to organize the cleanup crew to scoop them out of public view.

Obama, the Militarist, Outdoes His Predecessor

What makes Obama a much more audacious militarist and Wall Streeter than Bush is that he intends to pursue military policies, which have already greatly harmed the US people with appointed officials who have already been discredited in the context of failed imperial wars and with a domestic economy in collapse. While Bush launched his wars after the US public had their accustomed peace shattered by an orchestrated fear-mongering after 9/11, Obama intends to launch his escalation of military spending in the context of a generalized public disenchantment with the ongoing wars, with monumental fiscal deficits, bloated military budgets and after 100,000 US soldiers have been killed, wounded or psychologically destroyed.

Obama’s appointments of Clinton, General Jim Jones, dual Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel and super-Zionist Dennis Ross, among others, fit perfectly with his imperial-militarist agenda of escalating military aggression. His short list of intelligence candidates, likewise, fits perfectly with his all-out effort to “regain US world leadership” (reconstruct US imperial networks). All the media blather about Obama’s efforts at ‘bipartisanship’, ‘experience’ and ‘competence’ obscures the most fundamental questions: The specific nominees chosen from both parties are totally committed to military-driven empire-building. All are in favor of “a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world” (read ‘America’s imperial dominance in the world’), as Obama’s Secretary of State-to-be, Hillary Clinton, declared. General James Jones, Obama’s choice for National Security Advisor, presided over US military operations during the entire Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo period. He was a fervent supporter of the ‘troop surge’ in Iraq and is a powerful advocate for a huge increase in military spending, the expansion of the military by over 100,000 troops and the expanded militarization of American domestic society (not to mention his personal financial ties to the military industrial complex). Robert Gates, continuing as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, is a staunch supporter of unilateral, unlimited and universal imperial warfare. As the number of US-allied countries with troops in Iraq declines from 35 to only 5 by January 1, 2009 and even the Iraqi puppet regime calls for a withdrawal of all US troops by 2012, Gates, the intransigent, insists on a permanent military presence.

The issue of ‘experience’ revolves around two questions: (a) experience related to what past political practices? (b) experience relevant to pursue what future policies? All the nominees’ past experiences are related to imperial wars, colonial conquests and the construction of client states. Hiliary Clinton’s ‘experience’ was through her support for the bombing of Yugoslavia and the Nato invasion of Kosova, her promotion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an internationally recognized terrorist-criminal organization as well as the unrelenting bombings of Iraq in the 1990s, Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s murderous bombing of civilian centers in Lebanon…and now full-throated calls for the ‘total obliteration of Iran’. Clinton, Gates and Jones have never in their mature political careers proposed the peaceful settlement of disputes with any adversary of the US or Israel. In other words, their vaunted ‘experience’ is based solely on their one-dimensional militarist approach to foreign relations.

‘Competence’, as an attribute again depends on the issue of ‘competence to do what’? In general terms, ‘The Three’ (Clinton, Gates and Jones), have demonstrated the greatest incompetence in extricating the US from prolonged, costly and lost colonial wars. They lack the minimum capacity to recognize that military-driven empire-building in the context of independent states is no longer feasible, that its costs can ruin an imperial economy and that prolonged wars erode their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens.

Even within the framework of imperial geo-political strategic thinking, their positions exhibit the most dense incompetence: They blindly back a small, highly militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state (Israel) against 1.5 billion Muslims living in oil and mineral resource-rich nations with lucrative markets and investment potential and situated in the strategic center of the world. They promote total wars against whole populations, as is occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot be won. They are truly ‘Masters of Defeat’.

The point of the matter is that Obama appointed the ‘Big Three’ for their experience, competence and bipartisan support in the pursuit of imperial wars. He overlooked their glaring failures, their gross violations of the basic norms of civilization (of the human rights of tens of millions civilians in sovereign nations) because of their willingness to pursue the illusions of a US-dominated new world order.

Conclusion

Nothing speaks to Obama’s deep and abiding commitment to become the savior of the US empire as clearly as his willingness to appoint to the highest position of policy making the most mediocre failed politicians and generals merely because of their demonstrated willingness to pursue the course of military-driven empire building even in the midst of a collapsing domestic economy and ever more impoverished and drained citizenry.

Just as Obama’s electoral campaign and subsequent victory will go into the annals as the political con-job of the new millennium, his economic and political appointments will mark another ‘historic’ moment: The nomination of corrupt and failed speculators and warmongers. Let us join the inaugural celebration of our ‘First Afro-American’ Imperial President, who wins by con and rules by guns!

Statement From G-20 Summit: In English

By Catherine Austin Fitts.

The Editor of Expresso in Portugal wanted my take on the recent G-20 communique. Here is my “translation” of the official statement:

1. Now that the growth of debt and derivatives bubbles has stalled, we are committed to using governmental-central bank mechanisms to cover the positions of any of the large private financial institutions whose profits are at risk due to their management of these bubbles and who can use this opportunity to squeeze and acquire smaller rivals at low cost.

2. Our commitment to use derivatives and market interventions to shift investment from the real economy and commodities into a paper economy is firm. We will continue to use centralized governmental mechanisms to subsidize and manage this process.

3. All of the organizations and players who reaped a fortune engineering the debt and derivatives bubbles will be allowed to keep their winnings.

4. We will use this period of consolidation to further centralize the global financial system by enforcing greater centralization of the standards, practices and control of enforcement and regulatory bureaucracies. This increased governmental centralization will be presented as the “fix” for our “problems.”

5. We will continue the move toward one world government and one world currency.

6. We are prepared to use coordinated inflation of global money supplies and fiscal stimulus to protect our control and positions.

7. We are committed to the Slow Burn (see my blog post on this subject).

8. This process will continue to be managed to protect large insurance and risk positions.

9. The net result will be to continue to exercise growing control over the real economy by a handful of private families and institutions designed to protect and grow intergenerational wealth.

G-20 are silent on the military and covert action that will be required to make this stick. They are also silent on how they are going to manage this much inflation. For example, the most recent figures from the St. Louis Fed indicate that the aggregate monetary base is growing at an annualized rate of almost 800%.

Watch for a new focus on “green investing” as the trick in all of this will be how to create new productivity when the absence of real prices mean there is no market to provide the necessary signals and financial incentives.

THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS CAN’T TAKE MUCH MORE PUNISHMENT

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com via Alternet.

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.
— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

The Republican and Democratic conventions are just around the corner, which means that we’re at a critical time in our nation’s history. For this is the moment when the country’s political and media consensus finally settles on the line of bullshit it will be selling to the public as the “national debate” come fall.

If you pay close attention you can actually see the trial balloons whooshing overhead. There have been numerous articles of late of the Whither the Debate? genus in the country’s major dailes and news mags, pieces like Patrick Healy’s “Target: Barack Obama. Strategy: What Day is it?” in the New York Times. They ostensibly wonder aloud about what respective “plans of attack” Barack Obama and John McCain will choose to pursue against one another in the fall.

In these pieces we already see the candidates trying on, like shoes, the various storylines we might soon have hammered into our heads like wartime slogans. Most hilarious from my viewpoint is the increasingly real possibility that the Republicans will eventually decide that their best shot against Obama is to pull out the old “He’s a flip-flopper” strategy — which would be pathetic, given that this was the same tired tactic they used against John Kerry four years ago, were it not for the damning fact that it might actually work again. (I’m actually not sure sometimes what is more repulsive: the bosh they trot out as campaign “issues,” or the enthusiasm with which the public buys it.)

Naturally we’ll also see the “Patriotism Gap” storyline whipped out and reused over and over again. There will also be much talk emanating from the McCain camp about “experience,” although this line of attack will not be nearly as fruitful for him as it was for Hillary Clinton, mainly because the word “experience” in McCain’s case also has a habit of reminding voters that the Arizona senator is, well, wicked old.

The Obama camp, playing with a big halftime lead as the cliché goes, is going to play this one close to the vest, sticking to a strategy of using larger and larger fonts every week for their “CHANGE” placards, and getting the candidates’ various aides and spokesgoons to use the term “McCain-Bush policies” as many times as possible on political talk shows. Obama will also use this pre-convention period to do what every general election candidate does after a tough primary-season fight, i.e. ditch all the positions he took en route to securing the nomination and replace them with opinions subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) reconfigured to fit the latest polling information coming out of certain key swing states. Both sides as well as the pundit class will describe this early positioning for combat over swing-state electoral votes as a “race for the center” (AP, July 3: “Candidates Courting the Center”), as if the “political center” in America were a place where huge chunks of the population tirelessly obsessed over semi-relevant media-driven wedge issues like stem-cell research and gay marriage, even as they lacked money to buy food and make rent every month.

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the “wooden” and – condescending – Al Gore versus the “dummy” Bush, and 2004 featured that same ‘regular guy’ Bush against the “patrician” and “bookish” John Kerry (who also “looked French”), in 2008 we’re going to be sold the “maverick” McCain against the “smooth” Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines. Time has even experimented with a “poker versus craps” storyline, feeding off the incidental fact that Obama is a regular poker player while McCain reportedly favors craps, which apparently has some electorally relevant meaning — and if you know what that something is, please let me know.

We’re also going to be fed truckloads of onerous horseshit about the candidate wives. The Michelle Obama content is going to go something like this: the Fox/Limbaugh crowd will first plaster her with Buckwheatesque caricatures (the National Review cover was hilariously over-the-top in that respect) and racially loaded epithets like “baby Mama” (that via Fox News spokeswhore Michelle Malkin, God bless her) and “angry black woman” (via self-aggrandizing, cop-mustached Chicago-based prune Cal Thomas). Next, the so-called “mainstream” press, the “respectable” press, which of course is above such behavior, will amplify those attacks 10 million-fold via endless waves of secondary features soberly pondering the question of whether or not Michelle Obama is a “political liability” — because of stuff like the Thomas column, and Malkin’s quip and the endless rumors about a mysterious “whitey” video. Cindy McCain, meanwhile, will generally be described as a political asset, as the pundit class tends to applaud mute, stoned-looking candidate wives who have soldiered on bravely while being martyred by rumors of their mostly absent husband’s infidelities. It will help on the martyrdom front that McCain launched his political career with her family money and drove her into an actual, confirmable chemical dependency. As long as she keeps gamely wobbling onstage and trying to smile into the camera, she’s going to get straight As from the political press, guaranteed.

Some combination of all of these things is going to comprise the so-called “national debate” this fall. Now, we live in an age where our media deceptions are so far-reaching and comprehensive that they almost smother reality, at times seeming actually to replace reality — but even in the context of the inane TV-driven fantasyland we’ve grown used to inhabiting, this year’s crude cobbling together of a phony “national conversation” by our political press is an outrageous, monstrously offensive deception. For if, as now seems likely, this fall’s election is ultimately turned into a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate Michelle Obama’s face longer than John McCain’s diapers, it will be at the expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV network or live in Washington, you probably already know what that emergency is.

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents’ economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to “tell me what was going on in their lives economically.” He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I’ll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don’t have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.

This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried to sell her house to pay for her son’s schooling:

I don’t go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating “cereal and toast” for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.

“The middle class is disappearing,” says Sanders. “In real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country.”

Here’s the thing: nobody needs me or Bernie Sanders to tell them that it sucks out there and that times are tougher economically in this country than perhaps they’ve been for quite a long time. We’ve all seen the stats — median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. If you’re reading this and you had to drive to work today or pay a credit card bill in the last few weeks you know better than I do for sure how fucked up things have gotten. I hear talk from people out on the campaign trail about mortgages and bankruptcies and bill collectors that are enough to make your ass clench with 100 percent pure panic.

None of this is a secret. Here, however, is something that is a secret: that this is a class issue that is being intentionally downplayed by a political/media consensus bent on selling the public a version of reality where class resentments, or class distinctions even, do not exist. Our “national debate” is always a thing where we do not talk about things like haves and have-nots, rich and poor, employers versus employees. But we increasingly live in a society where all the political action is happening on one side of the line separating all those groups, to the detriment of the people on the other side.

We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices — the hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on foreign oil, “foreign” representing those nations, Arab and Chinese, that lend us the money to pay for our wars.

And while we’ve all heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our military spending, this is always portrayed as either “corruption” or simple inefficiency, and not what it really is — a profound expression of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary, struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.

You want an example? Sanders has a great one for you. The Senator claims that he has been trying for years to increase funding for the Federally Qualified Health Care (FQHC) program, which finances community health centers across the country that give primary health care access to about 16 million Americans a year. He’s seeking an additional $798 million for the program this year, which would bring the total appropriation to $2.9 billion, or about what we spend every two days in Iraq.

“But for five billion a year,” Sanders insists, “we could provide basic primary health care for every American. That’s how much it would cost, five billion.”

As it is, though, Sanders has struggled to get any additional funding. He managed to get $250 million added to the program in last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services bill, but Bush vetoed the legislation, “and we ended up getting a lot less.”

Okay, now, hold that thought. While we’re unable to find $5 billion for this simple program, and Sanders had to fight and claw to get even $250 million that was eventually slashed, here’s something else that’s going on. According to a recent report by the GAO, the Department of Defense has already “marked for disposal” hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts — and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order! In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force — some $235 million worth, or about the same amount Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health care program last year — are already marked for disposal! Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away!

“They’re planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn’t even come in yet,” says Sanders.

According to the report, we’re spending over $30 million a year, and employing over 1,400 people, just to warehouse all the defense equipment we don’t need. For instance — we already have thousands of unneeded aircraft blades, but 7,460 on the way, at a cost of $2 million, which will join those already earmarked for the waste pile.

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he’s going to “look at entitlement program” waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the “death tax.” We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis… well, shit, what can I say? That’s what’s happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting “entitlement” programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we’re not going to have that conversation, because we’re going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama’s voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few politicians out there smart enough and secure enough to understand that the future of American politics is necessarily going to involve some pretty frank and contentious confrontations. The phony blue-red divide, which has been buoyed for years by some largely incidental geographical disagreements over religion and other social issues, is going to give way eventually to a real debate grounded in a brutal economic reality increasingly common to all states, red and blue.

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

The Republicans wanted to take Social Security, the signature policy underpinning of the middle class, and put it into private accounts — which is a fancy way of saying that they wanted to take a huge bundle of American taxpayer cash and invest it in the very companies, the IBMs and Boeings and GMs and so on, that are exporting our jobs abroad. They want the American middle class to finance its very own impoverishment! The Democrats say no, let’s keep Social Security more or less as is, and let that impoverishment happen organically.

Now we have a new set of dire problems in the areas of home ownership and exploding energy prices. In both of these matters the basic dynamic is transnational companies raiding the cash savings of the middle class. Because those same companies finance the campaigns of our politicians, we won’t hear much talk about getting private industry to help foot the bill to pay for these crises, or forcing the energy companies to cut into their obscene profits for the public good. We will, however, hear talk about taxpayer-subsidized bailouts and various irrelevancies like McCain’s gas tax holiday (an amusing solution — eliminate taxes collected by government in order to pay for taxes collected by energy companies). Ultimately, however, you can bet that when the middle class finally falls all the way down, and this recession becomes something even worse, necessity will force our civil government — if anything remains of it by then — to press for the only real solution.

“Corporate America is going to have to reinvest in our society,” says Sanders. “It’s that simple.”

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Air force sought anti-terror funds so generals could fly in comfort

Must be nice! I’ll bet it makes the enlisted glad they’re fighting in this comfort-less war.

Source: Agence France Presse.

The US Air Force has sought millions of dollars in “war on terror” funds for “comfort capsules” so that the military brass can fly first class to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, a spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

The capsules, which are loaded into the bay of a military transport plane, come with a sofa, work space, two leather seats, a flat-screen TV, ports for a satellite phone and a separate module with two bunk beds and closets, the air force spokeswoman said.

Air force generals added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the costs with upgrades to leather, carpet and wood choices, according to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit watchdog group that obtained internal emails about the program.

One email alluded to concerns of General Robert MacMahon, an air force deputy chief of staff, that the capsules be designed for the highest standards of luxury travel, POGO said.

“General MacMahon’s concern is so significant that we need assurance by the end of the week from AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) that the SLICC will be ‘World class’ inside,” the e-mail is quoted as saying.

“While we know the requirements document says ‘business class’, we all know there are levels of that,” it said.

The first of the capsules is already in production at a cost of 2.7 million dollars, and is scheduled for delivery in five months, said air force spokeswoman Vicky Stein.

Stein said the new capsules were needed to keep pace with a growing demand for VIP travel to war zones.

“There are growing demands for senior leader transportation across the globe, especially into Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters,” she said.

“The diverts were aimed at responding as quickly as possible to growing requirements.”

Although the capsule came out of the US Air Force base budget, the service asked to use funds dedicated for the war on terrorism to fund the purchase of two more at 1.9 million dollars each. The request was denied, said Stein.

“We started with the idea of getting 10 capsules but we scaled it down to three, based on what it looked like we needed at the time,” she said. “We’re looking for other funding for the two.”

The air force also has acquired four pallets with four first class seats each as part of the effort to give VIPs comfortable seating on their way to war zones.

The air force calls them “the slick and the slip,” taken from acronyms for their official names: the senior leader conference capsule and the senior leader in-transit pallet.

The Washington Post, which first reported on the “comfort capsules,” as they were originally called by the air force, said at least four generals were involved in design decisions.

A request that the color of the leather seats be changed from brown to air force blue, and that seat pockets be added alone cost more than 68,000 dollars, the Post said.

It said the air force decided last year to take 331,000 dollars from war on terror funds to pay for a cost overrun resulting in part from the changes.

In a letter to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, POGO called it “an egregious failure of leadership … that involves breathtaking extravagance when every dollar needs to be wisely spent in a time of war.”

Ron Paul: Getting Out of Iraq

Source.

What will it take to get our troops out of Iraq? The roughly 70 percent of Americans who are firmly against the war often ask this question. Those in power are reluctant to give conditions, but when they do and those conditions are met, the goal post is quietly moved.

Voters were promised, passionately and vehemently, that the new Congress would bring our troops home. Many were explicitly elected in 2006 under that banner. But our troops are still overseas, funding has been increased even beyond the administration’s wish list, and troop withdrawal has been negotiated away.

When things are going badly in Iraq, they say we must stay until the situation improves. When things improve, they tell us we must stay because our gains cannot be jeopardized.

We are told that we must establish a functioning democracy there, and train Iraqi armed forces so they can keep order in our absence. Iraq now has a Constitution, an elected parliament, and hundreds of thousands of security forces. The problem now is that their troops are supposedly not trained quite well enough, and that could take many more years. Defining an adequate training level for Iraqi troops is highly nebulous and its anyone’s guess when or how that criteria could be satisfied.

The latest outrage came last week. For years we heard the administration claim over and over that the Iraqi government wants us there, and is begging us to stay. On the other hand, all they had to do was ask and we would respect their wishes and leave. That also has now happened. Al-Maliki perhaps took his cue from his challenger, al-Sadr, who has been clamouring for us to leave for years. Popular opinion in Iraq now mirrors that in the United States, with about 70 percent of Iraqis wishing us to leave.

At the end of the year, our Status of Forces Agreement expires. Without a new agreement and understanding with the Iraqi government regarding our presence there, we officially become occupiers.

Eventually our troops will leave Iraq. The overwhelming will of the people, in both countries, can’t seem to get them out. Things going well can’t get them out. Things going badly can’t get them out. Iraqis telling us to leave can’t get them out. Perhaps not even the UN can get them out. My hope is that it does not take the complete collapse of our financial system, but if we don’t leave under any other circumstances, economic chaos is inevitable, and will make it impossible to fund the war, even through debt and inflation.

We have been financing this war through inflation, and attempting to paper over reality with misleading economic indicators. The government has changed the methodology of calculating things like CPI and GDP to hide the bad news. They won’t even publish M3, the total money supply statistic anymore. But reality is hitting the American people at gas pumps and grocery stores, sending more Americans into foreclosure and unemployment lines. More are hurting while Washington keeps forgetting its promises. Eventually, this will all come to a head.

Perhaps an even greater fear is that even if our financial trouble doesn’t get our troops out of Iraq, moving them over to fight a new war in Iran, will. Washington should be crystal clear on this very important point – just getting the troops out of Iraq means nothing. Bringing them HOME means everything, and that is what the people in both countries demand.

Surprise! White House Guilty of Hiding Casualties from Public

The Bush Crime Syndicate has done a brilliant job keeping the human costs of the Iraq War from the public. They’re hoping that “out of sight” is “out of mind,” and it’s worked. No one really cares that our soldiers are being used and thrown away like Kleenex, as long as there’s no draft and the average Joe can watch the boob tube sanitized of the war’s brutality.

Source: Your Three Cents and the Washington Post.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is guilty of hiding the returning war dead from view. Gina Gray, the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery, discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to limit the media’s coverage of funerals of soldiers who have died in Iraq and she spoke out after she was enraged by the Army’s regulations and limitations.

The Washington Post reports that six weeks after they reported her story she was demoted and finally fired. After 10 days on the job, she was handling media coverage of Marine Colonel Thurman Higginbothom who had been killed in Iraq when the media was moved 50 yards away from the service making the service inaudible and photographs obstructed. Gray pushed for more coverage but was turned down by cemetery officials.

This is different from the policies enacted in 2005 when reporters were allowed to hear the prayers and eulogies and even film the handling of the folded flag. The access had gradually eroded and the officials who had brought attention to the matter had been fired for exposing the truth. She complained to the superintendent and was temporarily removed from her duties, along with four other directors before her. Arlington National Cemetery terminated her stating that Gray “failed to act in an appropriate manner.”

U.S. Journalist Photographs Grisly Aftermath of Attack in Iraq, Gets Booted by Military

Source: Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service.

U.S. journalist Zoriah Miller says he was censored by the U.S. military in the Iraqi city of Fallujah after photographing Marines who died in a suicide bombing.

On Jun. 26, a suicide bomber attacked a city council meeting in Fallujah, 69 kms west of Baghdad, between local tribal sheikhs and military officials.

Three Marines, Cpl. Marcus Preudhomme, Capt. Philip Dykeman, and Lt. Col. Max Galeai, assigned to 2d Battalion, 3rd Marine Division based in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, died in the attack.

The explosion also killed two interpreters and 20 Iraqis, including the mayor of the nearby town of Karmah, two prominent sheikhs and their sons, and another sheikh and his brother. All were members of the local “awakening council,” one of the U.S.-backed militias that have taken up arms against al Qaeda in Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi authorities.

Miller was embedded with Marines on a patrol one block from the attack when it occurred. He had originally turned down the option of going to report on the city council meeting that was bombed.

©Zoriah Miller

Remains of U.S. Marines in Fallujah on Jun. 26.

Miller ran with the Marines he was with to the scene of the attack. “As I ran I saw human pieces…a skull cap with hair, bone shards,” he told IPS during a telephone interview from the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad. “When we arrived at the building it was chaotic. There were Iraqis, police and civilians running around screaming. Bodies were being pulled out of the building.”

“I went in and there were over 20 people’s remains all over the place,” Miller continued, “Of the Marines I jogged in with, someone started to vomit. Others were standing around, not knowing what to do. It was completely surreal.”

“At that moment I realized this was far beyond anything I’d experienced, and I realized I wanted to focus and make sure I could capture what it felt like, and the visual horror,” Miller explained.

“I thought, ‘Nobody in the U.S. has any idea what it means when they hear that 20 people died in a suicide bombing.’ I want people to be able to associate those numbers with the scene and the actual loss of human life. And to show why soldiers are suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Miller told IPS.

Miller was taken out of the building by Marines, but then allowed back inside where he took one last photo of the carnage before they closed the scene to him.

“We spent most of the rest of the day as Marines picked up body parts and put them in buckets and bags,” he said.

In an Iraqi Police station in Karmah, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) was brought in to investigate the bombing. Millers’ photos were the only ones of the scene, so the NCIS team asked for them.

“I made them copies, but then one of the Marines came in and told me to delete my memory card after I give them the photos, and I refused,” Miller told IPS, “I told the NCIS that if they forced me to delete them, I would stop sharing them. So they stopped pressing that issue.”

Miller said that he was following the rules for embedded journalists. “That evening, during the debriefing, the guys [Marines] I was with told me that the higher-ups had said I was a stand-up guy and behaved well and to treat me well. The guys I was with were all very much on my side.”

Miller explained to IPS that he meticulously showed his photos to the Marines he was with to make sure he was not going to show any photos that would upset the family members of the deceased Marines. “They were all okay with them, so then about 96 hours after the bombing I published the photos on my blog.”

Then things got interesting.

“Tuesday [Jul. 1] I awoke to a call in their combat operations centre, and the person on the phone told me they were a PAO (Public Affairs Officer) at Camp Fallujah, and he wanted me to take my blog down right away,” Miller told IPS. “I asked them why, and was then called back after five minutes by a higher ranking PAO who claimed I had broken my contract by showing photos of dead Americans with U.S. uniforms and boots.”

Miller said the PAO claimed he was not allowed, by the embed contract, to show dead or wounded U.S. citizens or soldiers in the field. “I never signed any contract for that,” Miller said.

He was called back after another five minutes and told his embed was terminated and they would send him back to Baghdad on the next flight. He was then taken back to Camp Fallujah where he said, “Everyone was extremely angry and fired up at me.”

Nevertheless, the lower ranking Marines he had embedded with “were on my side, and they told me they thought that what was happening was wrong.”

Miller explained that he grew nervous when the flight was canceled due to a sandstorm, and then a security guard was assigned to him.

“I started to feel uncomfortable with this,” Miller explained. “The next day, Gen. Kelly, [Major General John Kelly, who is the Commanding General of the I Marine Expeditionary Force] wanted to have some words with me. I was to meet with him at 3 pm, and we sat outside in the sun for two hours and he never showed.”

Miller was told he would be flown out that night, but he was deleted from the flight and told that General Kelly wanted to see him, so he waited again until Thursday, Jul. 3. Again the general did not appear, so Miller was given an official letter about the grounds for the termination of his embed, signed by Gen. Kelly, and flown to Baghdad.

“Now, as I think about it, I think they needed the extra time to figure out what they were going to say about my dismissal,” Miller said. “Their original reason ended up being bogus, so they had to figure something else out.”

The letter he was given stated reasons for his dismissal as “you photographed the remains of U.S. soldiers”, “you posted these images along with detailed commentary”, and “by posting the images and your commentary you violated 14 H and O of the news media agreement you signed.”

In addition, the letter, which Miller read to IPS, stated, “By providing detailed information of the effectiveness of the attack and the response of U.S. forces to it, you have put all U.S. forces in Iraq at greater risk for harm.”

Miller feels the reason for his dismissal is otherwise.

“The bottom line is that the thing they cited as the reason for my dismissal was ‘information the enemy could use against you.’ They realized, probably from keeping track of my blog, that I was not showing identifiable features of a soldier … and they couldn’t find a reason to kick me out. Because it was a high ranking person who got killed, they were all fired up.”

Miller concluded, “Up to that point they said it was because I showed pictures of bodies with pieces of uniform and boots. The letter, though, doesn’t mention that at all. I checked the document I had about ground rules for media embeds, and I followed them.”

The Pentagon would not comment on the story when contacted by IPS, saying they had no information on Miller’s case beyond what Central Command had already posted.

A Backlog Of Cases Alleging Fraud by Government Contractors

Source: Carrie Johnson, Washington Post.

More than 900 cases alleging that government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars are languishing in a backlog that has built up over the past decade because the Justice Department cannot keep pace with the surge in charges brought by whistle-blowers, according to lawyers involved in the disputes.

The issue is drawing renewed interest among lawmakers and nonprofit groups because many of the cases involve the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising health-care payouts, and privatization of government functions — all of which offer rich new opportunities to swindle taxpayers.

Since 2001, 300 to 400 civil cases have been filed each year by employees charging that their companies defrauded the government. But under the cumbersome process that governs these cases, Justice Department lawyers must review them under seal, and whistle-blowers routinely wait 14 months or longer just to learn whether the department will get involved. The government rejects about three-quarters of the cases it receives, saying that the vast majority have little merit.

Disputes can stay buried for years more while the government investigates the allegations.

“Even if no new cases are filed, it might take 10 years for the Department of Justice to clear its desk. Cases in the backlog represent a lot of money being left on the table,” said Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, which advocates for Justice to receive more funding to support cases by whistle-blowers and their attorneys.

Supporters of federal intervention in the cases say the dividends are substantial: In recent years, verdicts and settlements have returned nearly $13 billion to the U.S. government.

At issue in most of the cases is whether companies knowingly sold defective products or overcharged federal agencies for items sold at home or offered to U.S. troops overseas. Under the Civil War-era False Claims Act, workers who file lawsuits alleging such schemes cannot discuss them or even disclose their existence until Justice decides whether to step in.

By its own account, the 75-lawyer unit in Washington that reviews the sensitive lawsuits is overloaded and understaffed. Only about 100 cases a year are investigated by the team, which works out of the commercial litigation branch of Justice’s civil division.

Critics argue that the delays are at least partly the result of foot-dragging by Justice and the federal agencies whose position it represents, especially in the touchy area of suppliers that may have overbilled the government for equipment, food and other items used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Justice lawyers have rejected about 19 cases involving contractor fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, registering five settlements that resulted in $16 million, officials said. Government officials said this week that they are considering whether to dive into 32 more whistle-blower cases involving Iraq or the Middle East.

“It’s just flatly absurd for us to be five years into this war” with so few public cases, said Alan Grayson, a whistle-blower lawyer in Florida who has criticized the Justice effort and who is running for Congress as a Democrat.

In a statement, Justice spokesman Charles Miller said that career lawyers and supervisors base their determinations on merit, not on political sensitivities. “Our decisions to intervene or decline in cases involving Iraq and the Middle East are entirely consistent with our record in [whistle-blower] cases generally,” he said.

Help from Justice greatly enhances the chances that a complicated fraud scheme can be unraveled, lawyers say. And department statistics show that cases Justice turns away win paltry, if any, financial recoveries.

Key lawmakers have called on Justice to make false-claims investigations a priority.

“Whistle-blowers are the key to the secrets locked in closets throughout the federal bureaucracy and government contractors,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “These patriotic Americans stick their necks out, against all odds, to help the federal government pursue fraud and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars that would otherwise be lost.”

Last month, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael F. Hertz told Congress that “the number and increased complexity of the fraud schemes presented to the department, combined with the volume of cases now under review, certainly present challenges.”

Among the largest false-claims cases to date are a $650 million settlement earlier this year by drugmaker Merck in connection with an alleged failure to repay Medicaid rebates; a $515 million deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to cover illegal drug pricing and marketing; and a $98 million agreement with software maker Oracle over pricing.

If their claims are successful, whistle-blowers can receive a hefty slice of the settlements or verdicts, sometimes as much as 20 percent of the award. A former Merck sales manager collected $68 million earlier this year for his role in exposing an alleged drug-pricing scheme.

Even bigger lawsuits containing potentially explosive allegations are waiting in the wings. The vast majority, more than 500 cases, involve the health-care and pharmaceutical industries and often involve Medicare and Medicaid funds.

Only a few hints of the Iraq and Afghanistan disputes have erupted publicly. One is a suit filed by two former employees of Custer Battles, a defense contracting company in Fairfax. The workers accused the company of inflating expenses on a contract it won to replace the Iraqi currency. After a three-week trial in 2006, a jury found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded them $10 million. But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III later tossed out the case, ruling that the money at issue, controlled in the early years of the Iraq conflict by the Coalition Provisional Authority, belonged to the Iraqi government, not U.S. taxpayers.

Justice declined the whistle-blowers’ request to intervene before the case went to trial, plaintiffs’ lawyers said. The government eventually weighed in with a court brief on behalf of the whistle-blowers when the case was appealed.

Frederick M. Morgan Jr., a Cincinnati lawyer who represents whistle-blowers, said that the numbers of lawyers willing to take on cases involving defense contractors has dwindled, in part because of Justice’s slow decisions.

One of Morgan’s lawsuits, against contractors hired by the Navy to build nuclear submarines and an Ohio company that manufactured submarine valves, took five years to resolve.

Another case, involving the manufacture of the F-22 fighter, was filed in early 1999. It was late 2006 before Justice decided not to intervene. The case is now in active litigation.

“The impact of a 7 1/2 -year delay in the litigation of a case is difficult to quantify but impossible to discount,” Morgan said.

Whistle-blower lawyers say other factors can contribute to long delays, including the difficulty in investigating claims in war-torn areas and complications that arise when military officials contend that technology or other products at issue in the lawsuits are classified. In addition, Justice lawyers who handle civil cases often cannot proceed until authorities decide whether a case merits criminal prosecution, the lawyers said.

Even when older cases are pushed into the open, the passage of time can present courtroom challenges.

Last year, a D.C. jury awarded whistle-blower Richard Miller more than $30 million, a figure that now-Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth tripled to $90 million. But in the dozen years since the suit was filed, witnesses’ memories of events had dimmed and the U.S. Agency for International Development had tossed its investigative files.

The judge blasted civil division lawyers for “doing virtually nothing” to follow up for four years after Miller brought forward allegations in 1995 about bid rigging on construction contracts in Egypt. The delays meant “loss of evidence, fading memories, disappearance of documents,” he wrote.

Justice spokesman Miller said that the civil case was stalled for years because criminal proceedings in the matter took priority. He added that the whistle-blower did not object to the government’s repeated entreaties for more time.

Last week, Lamberth denied defense motions for a new trial. But the verdict is likely to be appealed, according to lawyers who participated.

“I have a feeling we’re some way away from resolution,” said Charles S. Leeper, a lawyer for B.L. Harbert International, the main construction company involved in the case.

Five Stealth Pentagon Contractors Reaping Billions of Tax Dollars

Source: Nick Turse, TomDispatch.

At $34 billion, you’re already counting pretty high. After all, that’s Harvard’s endowment; it’s the amount of damage the triple hurricanes — Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne — inflicted in 2004; it’s what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers mean yearly in “medical expenses, lost work, property damage, quality of life loss and other related costs”; it’s the loans the nation’s largest, crippled, home lender, Countrywide Financial, holds for home-equity lines of credit and second liens; it’s Citigroup’s recent write-off, mainly for subprime exposure; it’s what New Jersey’s tourism industry is worth — and, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, it’s the minimal figure for the Pentagon’s “black budget” for fiscal year 2009 — money for, among other things, “classified weapons purchases and development,” money for which the Pentagon will remain unaccountable because almost no Americans will have any way of knowing what it’s being spent for.

Now, imagine that, due to a little more Pentagon/Bush administration wizardry, even this black budget estimate is undoubtedly a low-ball figure. One reason is simple enough: The proposed $541 billion Pentagon 2009 budget doesn’t even include money for actual wars. George W. Bush’s wars are all paid for by “supplemental” bills like the $162 billion one Congress will soon pass — so the Department of Defense’s $34 billion black budget skips “war-related funding.” This means that even the overall figure for that budget remains darker than we might imagine (as in “black hole”). The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation. If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the “military-related” funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion a year.

There is, however, another stealth side to the Pentagon — the corporate side where a range of giant companies you’ve never heard of are gobbling up our tax dollars at phenomenal rates. Nick Turse, author of the single best account of how our lives are being militarized, our civilian economy Pentagonized, and the Pentagon privatized — I’m talking about The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives — now turns to the stealth corporate side of the Pentagon to give us a glimpse into the larger black hole into which our dollars pour. — Introduction by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch editor.

******

The top Pentagon contractors, like death and taxes, almost never change. In 2002, the massive arms dealers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman ranked one, two, and three among Department of Defense contractors, taking in $17 billion, $16.6 billion, and $8.7 billion. Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman did it again in 2003 ($21.9, $17.3, and $11.1 billion); 2004 ($20.7, $17.1, and $11.9 billion); 2005 ($19.4, $18.3, and $13.5 billion); 2006 ($26.6, $20.3, and $16.6 billion); and, not surprisingly, 2007 as well ($27.8, $22.5, and $14.6 billion). Other regulars receiving mega-tax-funded payouts in a similarly clockwork-like manner include defense giants General Dynamics, Raytheon, the British weapons maker BAE Systems, and former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, as well as BP, Shell, and other power players from the military-petroleum complex.

With the basic Pentagon budget now clocking in at roughly $541 billion per year — before “supplemental” war funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the President’s Global War on Terror, as well as national security spending by other agencies, are factored in — even Lockheed’s hefty $28 billion take is a small percentage of the massive total. Obviously, significant sums of money are headed to other companies. However, most of them, including some of the largest, are all but unknown even to Pentagon-watchers and antiwar critics with a good grasp of the military industrial complex.

Last year, in a piece headlined “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow,” Vanity Fair published an exposé of one of the better known large stealth contractors, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). SAIC, however, is just one of tens of thousands of Pentagon contractors. Many of these firms receive only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pentagon every year. Some take home millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Then there’s a select group that are masters of the universe in the ever-expanding military-corporate complex, regularly scoring more than a billion tax dollars a year from the Department of Defense. Unlike Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, however, most of these billion-dollar babies manage to fly beneath the radar of media (not to mention public) attention. If appearing at all, they generally do so innocuously in the business pages of newspapers. When it comes to their support for the Pentagon’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are, in media terms, missing in action.

So, who are some of these mystery defense contractors you’ve probably never heard of? Here are snapshot portraits, culled largely from their own corporate documents, of five of the Pentagon’s secret billion-dollar babies:

1. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $3,360,739,032

This is billionaire investor Ronald Perelman‘s massive holding company. It has “interests in a diversified portfolio of public and private companies” that includes the cosmetics maker Revlon and Panavision (the folks who make the cameras that bring you TV shows like 24 and CSI). MacAndrews & Forbes might, at first blush, seem an unlikely defense contractor, but one of those privately owned companies it holds is AM General — the folks who make the military Humvee. Today, says the company, nearly 200,000 Humvees have been “built and delivered to the U.S. Armed Forces and more than 50 friendly overseas nations.” Humvees, however, are only part of the story.

AM General has also assisted Carnegie Mellon University researchers in developing robots for the Pentagon blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Grand Challenge,” an autonomous robot-vehicle competition. Last year, AM General and General Dynamics Land Systems, a subsidiary of mega-weapons maker General Dynamics, formed a joint venture “to compete for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program.” AM General has even gone to war — dispatching its “field service representatives” and “maintenance technical representatives” to Iraq where they were embedded with U.S. troops.

As such, it’s hardly surprising that, earlier this year, the company received one of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Outstanding Readiness Support Awards. Nor should anyone be surprised to discover that a top MacAndrews & Forbes corporate honcho, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer Barry F. Schwartz, contributed a total of at least $10,000 to Straight Talk America, the political action committee of presidential candidate John McCain, who famously said it would be “fine” with him if U.S. troops occupied Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” (if not “a thousand” or “a million”).

Perhaps hedging their bets just a bit, MacAndrews & Forbes is diversifying into an emerging complex-within-the-Complex: homeland security. Recently, AM General sold the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol “more than 100 Hummer K-series trucks for use in border security operations.”

2. DRS Technologies, Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,791,321,140

Incorporated during the Vietnam War, DRS Technologies has long been “a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide”; that is, they have been in the business of fielding products that enhance some of the DoD’s deadliest weaponry, including “DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters, F-15 Eagle tactical fighters… [and] Ohio, Los Angeles and Virginia class submarines.” They even have “contracts that support future military platforms, such as the DDG-1000 destroyer, CVN-78 next-generation aircraft carrier, Littoral Combat Ship and Future Combat System.”

In addition to 2007′s haul of Pentagon dollars, DRS Technologies has continued to clean up in 2008 for a range of projects, including: a $16.2 million Army contract for refrigeration units; $51 million in new orders from the Army for thermal weapon sights (part of a five-year, $2.3-billion deal inked in 2007); a $10.1 million contract to build more than 140 M989A1 Heavy Expanded Mobility Ammunition Trailers (to transport “numerous and extremely heavy Multiple Launch Rocket System pods, palletized or non-palletized conventional ammunition and fuel bladders”); and a $23 million deal “to provide engineering support, field service support and general depot repairs for the Mast Mounted Sights (MMS) on OH-58 Kiowa Warrior attack helicopters,” among many other contracts.

Fitch Ratings, an international credit rating agency, recently made a smart, if perhaps understated, point — one that actually fits all of these billion-dollar babies. DRS, it wrote, “has benefited from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan…”

3. Harris Corporation

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,501,163,834

Harris is “an international communications and information technology company serving government, defense and commercial markets in more than 150 countries.” It has an annual revenue of more than $4 billion and an impressive roster of former military personnel and other military-corporate complex insiders on its payroll. Not only does Harris assist and do business with a number of the Pentagon’s largest contractors (like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems), it is also an active participant in occupations abroad. On its website, the company boasts that “Harris technology has been used for a variety of commercial and defense applications, including the War in Iraq where the [Harris software] system provided detailed, 3-D representations of Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities.”

Last year, Harris signed multiple deals with the military, including contracts to create a high-speed digital data link that transmits tactical video, radar, acoustic, and other sensor data from Navy MH-60R helicopters to their host ships. It also supplies the Navy with advanced computers that provide the “highly sophisticated moving maps and critical mission information via cockpit displays” used by flight crews.

In the first six months of this year, Harris has continued its hard work for the Complex. In January, the company was “selected by the U.S. Air Force for the Network and Space Operations and Maintenance (NSOM) program” for “a base contract and six options that bring the potential overall value to $410 million over six-and-a-half-years” to provide “operations and maintenance support to the 50th Space Wing’s Air Force Satellite Control Network at locations around the world.”

In May, the company was “awarded a three-year, $20 million contract by [top 10 Pentagon contractor] L3 Communications to provide products and services for a next-generation Tactical Video Capture System (TVCS)” — a system that integrates real time video streams to enhance tactical training exercises — “that will support training at various U.S. Marine Corps locations across the U.S. and abroad.” That same month, Harris was also “awarded a potential five-year, $85 million Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract from the U.S. Navy for multiband satellite communications terminals that will provide advanced communications for aircraft carriers and other large deck ships.”

In addition, Harris is now hard at work in the Homeland. Not only did the company pick up more than $3 million from the Department of Homeland Security last year, but national security expert Tim Shorrock, in a 2007 CorpWatch article, “Domestic Spying, Inc.,” specifically noted that Harris and fellow intelligence industry contractors “stand to profit from th[e] unprecedented expansion of America’s domestic intelligence system.”

4. Navistar Defense

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,166,805,361

Still listed in Pentagon documents under its old name, International Military and Government, LLC, Navistar is the military subsidiary of Navistar International Corporation — “a holding company whose individual units provide integrated and best-in-class transportation solutions.” While the company has served the U.S. military since World War I, it’s known, if at all, by the public for making some of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed to thwart Iraqi roadside bombs. As of April 2008, the U.S. military had “ordered 5,214 total production MaxxPro MRAP vehicles” from Navistar and, that same month, the company was awarded “a contract valued at more than $261 million… for engineering upgrades to the armor used on International MaxxPro MRAP vehicles.”

But Navistar makes more than MRAPs. Just last month, the company signed a “multi-year contract valued at nearly $1.3 billion” with the U.S. Army “to provide Medium Tactical Vehicles and spare parts to the Afghanistan National Police, Afghan National Army, and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.” This followed a 2005 multi-year Army contract, worth $430 million, “for more than 2,900 vehicles and spare parts.”

Quite obviously, the company is significantly, profitably, and proudly involved in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Tom Feifar, the Global Defense and Export general manager for Navistar Parts, put it late last year, “It’s an honor to be a part of the effort to support our troops.”

5. Evergreen International Airlines

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,105,610,723

A privately held global aviation services company, it has subsidiaries in related industries such as helicopter aviation (Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.), as well as a few unrelated efforts like producing “agricultural, nursery and wine products” (Evergreen Agricultural Enterprises, Inc.). Evergreen has been on the Pentagon’s payroll for a long time. Back in 2004, Ed Connolly, the executive vice president of Evergreen International Airlines, stated, “Evergreen has flown continuously for the [U.S. Air Force] Air Mobility Command since 1975 and is proud to continue its long standing history of supporting the U.S. Armed Forces global missions with quality and reliable services.”

Not surprisingly, Evergreen has been intimately involved in the occupation of Iraq. In fact, in 2004, the company received “approximately 200 awards for its support of international airlift services during the Iraq war” from the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. An Air Force general even handed out these medals and certificates of achievement to Evergreen’s employees.

In Amnesty International’s 2006 report, “Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and ‘Disappearance,’” the human rights organization noted that Evergreen was one of only a handful of private companies with current permits to land at U.S. military bases worldwide. That same year, the company even airlifted FOX News personality Bill O’Reilly and his TV show crew to Kuwait and Iraq to meet and greet troops, sign books and pictures, and hand out trinkets. And just last year the company was part of a consortium, including such high profile commercial carriers as American, Delta, and United Airlines that the Pentagon awarded a “$1,031,154,403 firm fixed-price contract for international airlift services… [that] is expected to be completed September 2008.”

Under the Radar

All told, these five stealth corporations from the military-corporate complex received more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2007. To put this into perspective, that sum is almost $2 billion more than the Bush administration’s proposed 2009 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. Put another way, it’s about nine times what one-sixth of the world’s population spent on food last year.

Tens of thousands of defense contractors — from well-known “civilian” corporations (like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Dell) to tiny companies — have fattened up on the Pentagon and its wars. Most of the time, large or small, they fly under the radar and are seldom identified as defense contractors at all. So it’s hardly surprising that firms like Harris and Evergreen, without name recognition outside their own worlds, can take in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice or comment in our increasingly militarized civilian economy.

When the history of the Iraq War is finally written, chances are that these five billion-dollar babies, and most of the other defense contractors involved in making the U.S. occupation possible, will be left out. Until we begin coming to grips with the role of such corporations in creating the material basis for an imperial foreign policy, we’ll never be able to grasp fully how the Pentagon works and why we so regularly make war in, and carry out occupations of, distant lands.

Political Cortex blog: It’s the Iraq War that’s Killing the Economy, Stupid!

By Bob Kendall.

As billions are going down the drain in Iraq, this wild misadventure is destroying the once strong U.S. dollar.Economic vultures all over the world delight in seeing what was once the world’s economic super power’s financial stability being demolished.

Foreigners are buying out major assets as the dollar dramatically declines. Belgium may buy the biggest brewery in the U.S. In 2007 foreign investors spent $414 billion buying some of the biggest assets of the U.S.A.

There is even talk now of the New York City landmark Chrysler Building being sold.

Perhaps now the U.S. won’t outsource jobs to China, India or Bangladesh.Foreigners who buy out U.S. corporations will have cheap U.S. labor, a labor force anxious to accept jobs they may desperately need to cope with inflation as their currency declines. And they will have to work hard to pay off the $10 trillion debt the Bush Administration generated.

Saudi Arabia and China’s bond buying is keeping us afloat. If the U.S. dollar declines much further, they may decline to buy our bonds, and then what?

We are borrowing from China to pay the Saudis for the oil we are using for our gas guzzling SUV’s.

All this is going on while George Bush enjoyed a week long European whirlwind farewell tour. In every major city, Bush smiles and waves for TV cameras as if he was on a triumphant farewell tour. With Europeans having a lower popularity rating for Bush than even U.S. low ratings, this is strange.

Glancing back at the Vietnam War, which cost the lives of over 59,000 U.S. service personnel, and over 2.5 million Vietnamese and Cambodians, historians have asked in countless Vietnam books -What was the Vietnam War fought for and precisely what was accomplished?

Is Iraq a re-run?

The fear factor drove the Vietnam War fear. It was perpetrated by a media propaganda campaign. Could it be this was the concerted activity of the military-industrial complex that the Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about?

The domino effect was the idea that if the U.S. did not stop the Communists in Vietnam, all of Asia might fall like a row of dominoes into Communist rule.

When the U.S. fled Vietnam and the Communist North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam, all of Asia did not become Communist. The domino effect fear hysteria had been proven false. Even Robert McNamara finally admitted that it was a hopeless war.

How time changes everything! In 2008 China is the biggest trading partner of the U.S.A., with our trade balance to China being in the billions.

The money made possible by the Saudis and China buying U.S. bonds keeps the U.S. functioning economically in 2008.

Don’t talk about Democrats being the big spenders. Not when Bush’s national debt is bigger than all the previous national debts combined – approaching $10 trillion.

Traders today are considering, due to the drastic dollar decline, ceasing to use the battered U.S. dollar as the world’s bench mark currency.

Don’t blame the international currency traders for contemplating this possibility. Blame Bush!

With the British pound now worth twice the value of the U.S. dollar and the Euro over 50 percent higher than the dollar’s value, the U.S. economic plight is quite apparent.

Gas prices go up, up and away, higher than ever. Food prices, college costs, hospital expenses, building materials, autos, everything is going up. The cost of living is skyrocketing, demolishing the American dream as salaries for American workers slump.

What about those Americans who save their money, putting it in banks for safe keeping?

The last Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to the lowest level in over 40 years. This triggered the home building bubble, with people investing in residential property as if was the stock market.

Now that the bubble has burst and home prices in many areas have drastically descended, the new Fed chief Ben Bernanke cuts the interest rate repeatedly, just like Greenspan did.

Senior citizens on fixed incomes and the U.S. bond buyers, who keep the nation’s economy going, are automatically cheated out of a fair return on their money.

Senior citizens who rely on a fair return on money they have accumulated through a lifetime of hard work, now get a return often less than the inflation rate. This means that banks are using savers and U.S. bond buyers’ money for free.

The 2.5 million mortgage foreclosures, by a strange twist of fate, is the same number of mortgage foreclosures that occurred during the Great Depression.

79 million senior citizens (referred to as baby boomers) are looking forward to retirement with social security and Medicare assistance.

All this is occurring while the U.S. dollar crashes and the cost of living increases, with job layoffs in the auto and airline industries.

Homeless people roam the streets, begging for sustenance. A recent CNN report disclosed that the U.S.A., representing only 5 percent of the world’s population, uses two-thirds of the world’s drug market.

Dante J. Driver of Seattle wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the Letters to the Editor on June 18:

“The Federal Reserve has actually been pursing inflationary fiscal and monetary policy since the eighties. Profligate government spending by both parties and historically low tax and interest rates have pumped cash into the economy that fueled the technology, real estate (and arguably the current commodity bubbles).”

More than one hundred years ago, in speaking of American, British historian Lord Macaulay warned, “Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the empire came from without and your Huns and vandals will have been engendered within your own country, by your own institutions.”